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Syd Barrett: Was he suffering from schizophrenia or asperger’s syndrome?
Abstract
Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett (Cambridge, January 6, 1946 - Cambridge, July 7, 2006) was a British singer, guitarist, composer and painter, founder and leader of Pink Floyd from 1965 to 1968, when he left the group.
Before retiring to private life, he recorded two solo albums, “The Madcap Laughs” and “Barrett”, published in 1970. His experience and skills strongly influenced the subsequent production of the group, especially albums like “Dark Side of the Moon”, “Wish You Were Here” and “The Wall”.
The innovative guitar style of Barrett and his propensity to exploration of new experimental techniques, like the use of dissonance, distortion and feedback, had an enormous impact on several musicians, from David Bowie to Brian Eno to Jimmy Page. After his retirement, Barrett led a secluded life painting and devoted to gardening, completely ignoring all the popularity and by losing his own tracks fueling even more his legend. A series of biographies were written about him since the eighties. In any case, the Pink Floyd composed and recorded several musical tributes dedicated to him after his departure from the band.
The use of synthetic drugs of any kind and social withdrawal fostered the clinical impression that Barrett was suffering from schizophrenia. Recent studies, however, would suggest the hypothesis that he was suffering from a low-functioning Asperger’s syndrome. The aim of this paper is to review Barrett’s data that would indicate that this was actually his diagnosis.
... He also agreed to attend therapy sessions at Greenwoods, a residential retreat in Essex, during the early 1980's (Watkinson & Anderson, 2007). Numerous academics and authors have speculated about whether Barrett suffered from Asperger's syndrome and/or Schizophrenia, claiming that he demonstrated behaviours associated with both (Campanella, 2015;Watkinson & Anderson, 2007). In his early fifties, Barrett was diagnosed with diabetes, but struggled to adhere to the rigorous diet and medication regime. ...
This study constitutes a psychobiography of the rock pioneer and Pink Floyd co-founder, Syd Barrett (1946-2006). The primary aim of the study was to explore and describe the psychosocial personality development of the subject, Syd Barrett, according to Erikson’s theory. Therefore, this single case psychobiography attempted to inductively reconstruct the life-long personality development of Barrett, aided by Erikson’s psychosocial theory. Furthermore, the study aimed to test the relevance of Erikson’s psychosocial stages through the analytical generalisation of these stages to Barrett’s life. The subject was selected using non-probability, purposive sampling. A review of current literature yielded no previous psychobiographical studies based on Barrett. Data collected for analysis consisted primarily of primary and secondary resources, and were extracted according to Alexander’s (1988, 1990) indicators of salience.
The findings of this study supported the relevance and applicability of Erikson’s (1963, 1968, 1977) psychosocial theory of development. Therefore, Erikson’s theory proved adequate in the process of deconstructing and evaluating Barrett’s personality development. The study concluded that Barrett only managed to resolve the first psychosocial stage, followed by malignant and maladaptive resolutions to the subsequent stages. The death of his father as well as his ousting from Pink Floyd, were highlighted as two major catalysts of these unsuccessful resolutions. Eventually, Barrett would recycle the initially successfully resolved first stage, leading to a pervasive mistrust in society. Living the second half of his life as a social recluse, Barrett passed away at the age of 60 on the 7th of July 2006. The study challenges the age-parameters put forth by Erikson, as the evidence suggests that Barrett indeed experienced the crises of all eight stages, despite his early death. The study also provides evidence for the validity of the ninth stage of psychosocial development, as observed in Barrett’s life. Suggestions and recommendations are made for future psychobiographical endeavours.
Keywords: psychobiography; Syd Barrett; psychology, Erikson; psychosocial stages;
... 5). More formal diagnoses such as Asperger's Syndrome (Campanella, 2015), a personality disorder (Willis, 2006) and a psychotic reclusive state (Fusar-Poli, 2007), have all been suggested. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to compare the stories of Syd Barrett musician, with Andrew Voyce, and their respective recovery journeys.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use collaborative autoethnography to share their own perspectives on Syd Barrett and to contrast his story with that of Andrew, a co-author.
Findings
Both Syd and Andrew experienced serious mental distress. While Syd had only limited contact with mental health services, Andrew’s contact was extensive, with a 20-year history of admissions and discharges. In the end, when the psychiatric services listened to Andrew’s concerns and acted on them, he was able to enter into the journey of recovery.
Research limitations/implications
The authors are restricted in the amount of available information on Syd Barrett, especially that related to mental health problems. The story of Andrew shows how recovery is possible even after years of serious mental illness.
Practical implications
Andrew’s story shows why professionals should never give up on people, with even the most seemingly severe and intractable problems. Could services have done more for Syd?
Social implications
Mental illness still attracts huge stigma. Today there is a much more open culture. Would Syd have come out about his own struggles with mental health had society been more open?
Originality/value
Bringing together two stories of mental distress enables the authors to explore the concept of recovery.
... Here we apply the proposed method to classification of brain networks from healthy and schizophrenic subjects from the COBRE dataset. Diagnosing schizophrenia from fMRI data can be useful in clinical practice as behavioral data can be misleading in diagnosing such disorders (Campanella, 2015), and understanding which regions of the brain are implicated in schizophrenia is an important step towards developing new treatments. ...
Large complex network data have become common in many scientific domains, and require new statistical tools for discovering the underlying structures and features of interest. This thesis presents new methodology for network data analysis, with a focus on problems arising in the field of brain connectomics. Our overall goal is to learn parsimonious and interpretable network features, with computationally efficient and theoretically justified methods. The first project in the thesis focuses on prediction with network covariates. This setting is motivated by neuroimaging applications, in which each subject has an associated brain network constructed from fMRI data, and the goal is to derive interpretable prediction rules for a phenotype of interest or a clinical outcome. Existing approaches to this problem typically either reduce the data to a small set of global network summaries, losing a lot of local information, or treat network edges as a ``bag of features'' and use standard statistical tools without accounting for the network nature of the data. We develop a method that uses all edge weights, while still effectively incorporating network structure by using a penalty that encourages sparsity in both the number of edges and the number of nodes used. We develop efficient optimization algorithms for implementing this method and show it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on a dataset of schizophrenic patients and healthy controls while using a smaller and more readily interpretable set of features than methods which ignore network structure. We also establish theoretical performance guarantees. Communities in networks are observed in many different domains, and in brain networks they typically correspond to regions of the brain responsible for different functions. In connectomic analyses, there are standard parcellations of the brain into such regions, typically obtained by applying clustering methods to brain connectomes of healthy subjects. However, there is now increasing evidence that these communities are dynamic, and when the goal is predicting a phenotype or distinguishing between different conditions, these static communities from an unrelated set of healthy subjects may not be the most useful for prediction. We present a method for supervised community detection, that is, a method that finds a partition of the network into communities that is most useful for predicting a particular response. We use a block-structured regularization and compute the solution with a combination of a spectral method and an ADMM optimization algorithm. The method performs well on both simulated and real brain networks, providing support for the idea of task-dependent brain regions. The last part of the thesis focuses on the problem of community detection in the general network setting. Unlike in neuroimaging, statistical network analysis is typically applied to a single network, motivated by datasets from the social sciences. While community detection has been well studied, in practice nodes in a network often belong to more than one community, leading to the much harder problem of overlapping community detection. We propose a new approach for overlapping community detection based on sparse principal component analysis, and develop efficient algorithms that are able to accurately recover community memberships, provided each node does not belong to too many communities at once. The method has a very low computational cost relative to other methods available for this problem. We show asymptotic consistency of recovering community memberships by the new method, and good empirical performance on both simulated and real-world networks.
This chapter discusses from biographical, academic, and psychotherapeutic perspectives the psychological challenges that inform creative work in some performing musicians. We integrate views from academic, forensic, and clinical psychology, and the unique perspective of an “expert by experience” professional popular musician who is also a trained art psychotherapist. Creative work is aided by loosened associations and affective availability expressed in an accessible, structured way. If these qualities unravel, an individual may decompensate into a less productive mental state where illness dominates and disrupts the creative process. However, if the balance of difference and expression maintains, popular artworks that touch an audience can be produced, and with it, a greater empathic understanding of psychological differences for the person being entertained.
Synesthesia, a neurological condition affecting between 0.05%-1% of the population, is characterized by anomalous sensory perception and associated alterations in cognitive function due to interference from synesthetic percepts. A stimulus in one sensory modality triggers an automatic, consistent response in either another modality or a different aspect of the same modality. Familiality studies show evidence of a strong genetic predisposition; whereas initial pedigree analyses supported a single-gene X-linked dominant mode of inheritance with a skewed F:M ratio and a notable absence of male-to-male transmission, subsequent analyses in larger samples indicated that the mode of inheritance was likely to be more complex. Here, we report the results of a whole-genome linkage scan for auditory-visual synesthesia with 410 microsatellite markers at 9.05 cM density in 43 multiplex families (n = 196) with potential candidate regions fine-mapped at 5 cM density. Using NPL and HLOD analysis, we identified four candidate regions. Significant linkage at the genome-wide level was detected to chromosome 2q24 (HLOD = 3.025, empirical genome-wide p = 0.047). Suggestive linkage was found to chromosomes 5q33, 6p12, and 12p12. No support was found for linkage to the X chromosome; furthermore, we have identified two confirmed cases of male-to-male transmission of synesthesia. Our results demonstrate that auditory-visual synesthesia is likely to be an oligogenic disorder subject to multiple modes of inheritance and locus heterogeneity. This study comprises a significant step toward identifying the genetic substrates underlying synesthesia, with important implications for our understanding of the role of genes in human cognition and perception.
syd Barrett: a Very irregular head
- R Chapman
- A Tictmarsh
Chapman R, Tictmarsh A (2010). syd Barrett: a Very irregular
head. Faber & Faber, UK.
Madcap: the half-life of syd Barrett, Pink Floyd's Lost Genius
- T Willis
Willis T (2005). Madcap: the half-life of syd Barrett, Pink
Floyd's Lost Genius. Short Books, London.
Pigs might fly: the inside story of Pink Floyd
- M Blake
Blake M (2007). Pigs might fly: the inside story of Pink Floyd.
Aurum Press, UK.